Comment by furyofantares
3 hours ago
> Every game released whose developers have chosen to complicate its design with a client-server architecture.
Huh? Client-server architecture does make things more complicated to implement but it's not THAT bad. And you (usually[1]) do it in service of multiplayer, not because you're big budget or just want to complicate things.
Among Us was literally a three-person team.
[1] I find there are some major benefits to it, especially in post-LLM-world, and have been strongly considering it for some of my solo-dev single-player projects.
Remember back in the old days when you could just run your own game server, even though it wasn't open source? That would work too. Or peer to peer LAN gaming, why is that not popular any more?
Designing a game to use developer hosted servers is a choice they made. Probably to squeeze money from microtransactions.
Agreed, I'm pretty much doing the same thing for my indie game
It's now a lot more tractable to build a multiplayer game, on the other hand balancing it is a whole other kettle of fish
Among Us is also incredibly simple compared to the services required to support some AAA games and even then, their networking code was riddled with exploits that no professional would have written, including RCEs.
Didn't stop it from being a fun, successful game but there's no comparison to the work and complexity involved in larger games.
I'm aware. What's that got to do with anything?
I'm countering your argument that it's "not that bad". If that wasn't your point with mentioning the three person team, what was?
Recap:
> Client-server architecture does make things more complicated to implement but it's not THAT bad. Among Us was literally a three-person team.
The scope of the discussion extends beyond simple games like Among Us and some games require highly complex networked architectures that would be non-trivial to open up.
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A lot of games have tacked-on online features to excuse the existence of the server to enable DRM, and a lot of multiplayer games arbitrarily don't offer a way for clients to double as local servers like in the heyday of arena shooters.
Sure, but the existence of such annoying things does not mean that's the only reason to use a client-server architecture and that it would only affect those games.